Ali: The People's Champ

Ali name trended all over social media from global leaders and pop stars to top athletes, the world to remember boxing legend Muhammad Ali with hashtags such as the Greatest of All Time or #GOAT for short, and Rest in Power. During Ali’s reign he became an emblem of strength, eloquence, conscience and courage who dazzled with his lightning-fast jabs, his equally quick wit and unwavering principles. Ali was an anti-establishment showman who transcended borders and barriers, race and religion. His fights against other men became spectacles, but he embodied much greater battles.

Born Cassius Marcellus Clay on Jan. 17, 1942 in Jim Crow-era Louisville, Kentucky, to middle-class parents, father sign painter and a mother house cleaner. Ali witness the injustice and discrimination his parents had to live with as a child growing up. Ali started boxing when he was 12 and by the 18 he had the Golden Glove title and had won 100 of 108 amateur fights. Ali took home an Olympic gold medal at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome as a light heavyweight, but was soon dishearten when he returned home and was denied service at a segregated restaurant. Ali was so upset by this that he threw his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River.

Weeks after the Olympics, Ali relocating to Miami to work with top trainer Angelo Dundee and build a case for getting a shot at the heavyweight title. He signed a lucrative contract to go professional with Louisville business owners who guaranteed him an unprecedented 50-50 split in earnings. He then went on to win his first pro bout on Oct. 29, 1960, against Tunney Hunsaker.

Ali quickly ingratiated himself with the media with his boastful claims and fresh, stylish way of speaking. At a time when most fighters let their managers do the talking, Ali, inspired by professional wrestler "Gorgeous" George Wagner, thrived in—and indeed craved—the spotlight, where he was often provocative and outlandish. He controlled most press conferences and interviews, and spoke freely about issues unrelated to boxing. His knack for talking up his own talents — often in verse — earned him the dismissive nickname "the Louisville Lip," but he backed up his talk with action. Recoiling from the sport's tightly knit community of agents and promoters, Ali found guidance instead from the Nation of Islam, an American Muslim sect that advocated racial separation and rejected the pacifism of most civil rights activism. Inspired by Malcolm X, one of the group's leaders, he converted in 1963. But he kept his new faith a secret until the crown was safely in hand.

At the age of 22, he won the world heavyweight championship from Sonny Liston in a stunning upset in 1964. The new champion soon renounced Cassius Clay as his "slave name" and said he would be known from then on as Muhammad Ali — bestowed by Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad. He was 22 years old. The move split sports fans and the broader American public: an American sports champion rejecting his birth name and adopting one that sounded subversive. Between February 25, 1964 and September 19, 1964 Ali reigned as the undisputed heavyweight boxing champion. In 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War only three years after winning the heavyweight title, was drafted into the U. S. Military. Ali refused to be conscripted into the U.S. military, citing his religious beliefs and opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War. His stand culminated with an April appearance at an Army recruiting station, where he refused to step forward when his name was called. The reaction was swift and harsh.

He was eventually arrested and found guilty on draft evasion charges, fined $10,000, and stripped of his boxing title. He'd said previously that the war did not comport with his faith, and that he had "no quarrel" with America's enemy, the Vietcong. He refused to serve. "My conscience won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, some poor, hungry people in the mud, for big powerful America, and shoot them for what?" Ali said in an interview. "They never called me nigger. They never lynched me. They didn't put no dogs on me." Released on appeal but unable to fight or leave the country, Ali turned to the lecture circuit, speaking on college campuses, where he engaged in heated debates, pointing out the hypocrisy of denying rights to blacks even as they were ordered to fight the country's battles abroad. "My enemy is the white people, not Vietcongs or Chinese or Japanese," Ali told one white student who challenged his draft avoidance. "You my opposer when I want freedom. You my opposer when I want justice. You my opposer when I want equality. You won't even stand up for His appeal took four years to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, which in June 1971 reversed the conviction in a unanimous decision that found the Department of Justice had improperly told the draft board that Ali's stance wasn't motivated by religious belief.

Ali transformed the role and image of the African American athlete in America by his embrace of racial pride and his willingness to antagonize the white establishment in doing so. Ali was vilified as much as he was admired millions of people hated Ali; he threatened a sense of the racial order; he was, in his refusal to conform to any type. But, to the antiwar activists and black nationalists Ali's fiery commentary was praised the African-American community looked at him as if he was a hero who refused to bow in the face of racism, a black man who faced overwhelming bigotry the way he faced every opponent in the ring: fearlessly. Ali's actions as a conscientious objector to the war made him an icon for the larger counterculture generation.

Toward the end of his legal saga, Georgia agreed to issue Ali a boxing license, which allowed him to fight Jerry Quarry, whom he beat. Six months later, at a sold-out Madison Square Garden, he lost to Joe Frazier in a 15-round duel touted as "the fight of the century." It was Ali's first defeat as a pro. He later that year took it from George Foreman in Zaire dubbed "The Rumble in the Jungle". Ali successfully defended his title until 1978, when he was beaten by a young Leon Spinks, and then quickly took it back. He retired in 1979, when he was 37, but, seeking to replenish his dwindling personal fortune, returned in 1980 for a title match against Larry Holmes, which he lost. Ali lost again, to Trevor Berbick, the following year.

Finally, Ali retired for good. Ali remains the only three-time lineal world heavyweight champion; he won the title in 1964, 1974, and 1978. Nicknamed "The Greatest" for winning several historic boxing matches in his career. In 1984 he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease began to overwhelm his gifts for movement and speech despite his speech difficulties, he had no intellectual deficits.

Though gone from the ring, Ali entrenched himself in charitable work and humanitarian causes. He traveled to Lebanon in 1985 and Iraq in 1990 to seek the release of American hostages. From serving as a United Nations "Messenger of Peace" to supporting hunger and poverty relief. He appeared on the lecture circuit, although the frequency of his appearances lessened when his speech began to slur from his advancing disease.

At that time in his life, his wit was sharp and his thought processes were clear. He didn’t feel sorry for himself because of his physical condition, and there was no reason for anyone else to feel sorry for him. He loved being Muhammad Ali and was as happy with each day as anybody else. By that time the country’s attitudes changed, Ali became a focus of almost universal affection. In 1996, he lit the Olympic flame in Atlanta. In 2005, President George W. Bush honored Ali with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and his hometown of Louisville opened the Muhammad Ali Center, chronicling his life but also as a forum for promoting tolerance and respect.

Ali had suffered for three decades from Parkinson's, a progressive neurological condition that slowly robbed him of both his verbal grace and his physical dexterity. The late boxer was a deeply spiritual and intelligent man with endless tales, no regrets and a passion for life that never diminished, even as his condition did. He is one of the most recognized sports figures of the past 100 years. Ali was known for being an inspiring, controversial and polarizing figure both inside and outside the boxing ring.

The famed boxer and icon died at the age of 74 on June 3, 2016. Ali became arguably the most famous person on the planet, known as a supreme athlete, an uncanny blend of power, improvisation, and velocity; a master of rhyming prediction and derision; an exemplar and symbol of racial pride; a fighter, a draft resister, an acolyte, a preacher, a separatist, an integrationist, a comedian, father, husband, an actor, a dancer, a butterfly, a bee, a figure of immense courage. Ali was a towering social and political figure. He stood as a beacon of hope for oppressed people around the world and an embodiment of the principle that, unless you have a very good reason for killing people, war is wrong.

Ali you will be missed.

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